LOVE those old, manual typewriters —

A VINTAGE UNDERWOOD TYPEWRITER
like the one I learned to type on in the 1950s

Back in the 1950s, my mom was secretary of her bowling league. Every week she typed out individual averages and team standings for the league. As soon as she dragged this monster Underwood out of the closet and set it on the card table to update her stats, my sister and I begged to get our hands on it — that noisy, beautiful machine.No dice. She wouldn't let us just play with it. Oh, no. If we wanted to use it, she insisted we had to use it correctly, which meant learning how to touch-type. So we did, thanks to my mom's instruction.

Because we both played the piano, my mom used a technique familiar to us. She covered the typewriter keys with tape, marking all the left hand keys with pink, the right hand in blue. She didn't write the letter on the key but the finger that should be used to strike the key, much like reading piano music. Thus the "B" key tape was pink-2, the "L" key tape was blue-4 and so on.We each learned in about two days. It was a snap, partly because her teaching method worked but mostly because we had great incentive to get our hands on that big old piece of the past. Besides, it was way more fun than the piano, and it played no sour notes. 

Then she made a picture of the keyboard lay-out, showing the letter on each key, and laid that chart next to the typewriter. Thus we learned to type looking at the picture of the keyboard lay-out, not at the typewriter keys themselves, and using the correct fingers. It took some strength to press those manual keys — pre-computers, pre-electric typewriters — but we had the satisfaction of hearing the keys click and watching them slap against the paper.

Later I taught my three kids to type the same way and long before the schools taught keyboard, so when they tried their hand at computers, they were ready.

The first two newspapers I worked at — the Dearborn Guide and the Elizabeth Daily Journal — used sturdy typewriters like these. Their newsrooms thrummed with pounding keys, the ding of the return shift and ringing telephones mixed with voices of reporters on the phone and editors shouting across the room. I loved it.

Of course, back then newspapers were still being printed on Linotype machines, equipment that dated back to 1886. Invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854-99), the Linotype (Get it? line-of-type) remained a newspaper fixture until the 1970s.

The Linotype beat out the Paige compositor, an 18,000-piece machine backed by the great American novelist Mark Twain and later by Evanston businessman and inventor, T. K. Webster. In 1893 Webster's firm, the Webster Manufacturing Company of Chicago, signed a multi-million dollar contract to produce the complicated Paige typesetters, but the whole project fizzled out as the Paige machines had come late to the dance — arriving in the depth of the 1893 recession and, worse yet, quickly developing a reputation for huge costs and unreliability. Meanwhile, by 1893 the Linotype already dominated the publishing world and was considered both reliable and relatively inexpensive. Twain and Webster barely escaped financial ruin, thanks to the confounded Paige compositor that Twain once called "a cunning devil."

The typewriter itself came into common use in the 1870s and for a long time it wasn't the machine that was called the typewriter, but the person typing. A Milwaukee man invented the typewriter. Christopher Latham Sholes (1819-90) created it in 1867, spent several years perfecting it and then convinced E. Remington & Sons of New York to manufacture it for sale in 1873.

And, yes, Remington was the arms maker. With the Civil War recently ended, the firm probably needed a new product to put its name on.

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